I just installed Lubuntu 12.10 on a rather old PC, dualbooting with Windows XP. The partitioning scheme looks like this:
1st primary partition: 130GB NTFS, with Windows XP
2nd primary partition: 29GB ext4, with Lubuntu 12.10
3rd primary partition: 1GB swap
After the installation finished, and the PC rebooted, I ended up at GRUB rescue prompt with the unknown filesystem error. Here are outputs of some commands I tried:
ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos1) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos3) (fd0)
ls (hd0,msdos2)
error: unknown filesystem
(same for all of the msdos* partitions)
set
root=hd0,msdos2
prefix=(hd0,msdos2)/boot/grub
I searched high and low, and judging from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11917888 (post #4) and GRUB2 stuck at rescue console, showing "unknown filesystem" for all partitions (third answer) this seems like it's an actual GRUB2 bug! Does anybody know any other workaround than moving grub and kernels to the beginning of the drive (or to another drive)? I don't really like that because I would need to do this everytime I get a new kernel, and I will not have access to the computer at all times...
EDIT:
grub rescue> ls -l
error: no such partition
(I will add the livecd fdisk output as soon as I get it to boot, hooray for old CD-ROM drives...)
EDIT2: Just to note, this machine is indeed pretty old, the hard drive is 160GB IDE Western Digital Blue that I put in, but the motherboard with the CPU are very old, it's a 180nm 1.8GHz single core Celeron on a VIA motherboard... shall I try to chroot from the livecd and try to install GRUB 1?
ls -lat the grub rescue prompt andsudo fdisk -lufrom a livecd, and add the output to your question. – psusi Jan 2 at 2:14